PERILS, an independent organisation providing industry-wide catastrophe insurance data, has finally released what the Australian insurance industry is waiting for this year – industry losses for the catastrophic flooding in southeast Queensland and northern New South Wales (NSW).
From February 23 to March 08 this year, the east coast of Australia experienced heavy rainfall that resulted in major river and surface water flooding.
PERILS's initial estimate of the insured market loss, based on loss data collected from the Australian insurance market, hit AU$3,991 million – covering property and motor hull lines of business.
Commenting on the initial insurance industry losses, Darryl Pidcock, head of PERILS Asia-Pacific, said the extreme weather event's loss figure was the largest flood loss on record for the Australian insurance industry, exceeding the record Brisbane floods in 2011.
“It was a very complex weather event from a meteorological perspective with changing weather systems during the loss period. The resulting damage from pluvial and river flooding was considerable, especially for southeast Queensland and the northern regions of New South Wales,” Pidcock said.
Pidcock explained that the application of event definition clauses for reinsurance will vary across the market due to the complexity of the weather systems.
“Such clauses can include meteorological conditions and/or loss aggregation periods, such as the 168-hours clause, which means that there is no common market standard applied to the losses. Given these factors, the losses from this event have been reported by PERILS as one single insurance event,” he continued.
PERILS will publish an updated estimate of market loss from the catastrophic flooding in the two states on June 08, 2022. Meanwhile, it already published its final insurance loss estimate for the Queensland-NSW flooding that occurred from March 18 to 24 in 2021.
